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Hi Everyone,
Ignore the date on this entry as I'm in retrospective state!
19th June - We set off for Mount St Helens and took a liesurely drive across Oregon until we hit Castle Rock, Washington. Here we found a really good Motel, spookily called The Castle rock Motel! It is only 50 miles from the northern viewing area of Mount St helens and we met a fellow traveller as we were checking in who gave us some good advise for the stage of the journey but more on that later.
Fri 20th June - Mount St Helens is somewhere I have always wanted to visit. Most of you will know that it erupted with devastating effect in May 1980, so this is very recent history. The drive up to Mount St Helens is through lovely forest which kept the temperature down and filled the car with a lovely smell of fresh pine. everything you read advises the traveller to visit the first visitor centre on the the road up and to become familiar with your surroundings. The building itself is impressive, built of redwood and cedar it gives the impression of a very large ski lodge. Inside are interactive displays and a model showing Mount St helens and the surround area. Various buttons then show you where the blast area reached and the direction of of the mud flows that rersulted. Further displays show photographic images of the immediate time prior to the eruption then move through the events leading up to it and during the blast. The effect of the blast was incredible with millions of tons of rock being blown from the north west face, devastating the surrounding countryside and felling trees for 18 miles in a matter of five minutes. The mud flows raised the level of the nearby lake by 200 feet. We watched the film of the blast and then moved on the the top viewing area which is about an hour away. We listened to a park Ranger giving his presentation at the viewing point which was really good. He was so entertaining, clearly having given the same speal for so long it was second nature but He told the story as if it was happening and left you in no doubt as to how insignificant humans are in comparison to such power. No one who stayed in the area survived and the way trees have been literally sheared at the base of the trunk makes you wonder at what would have happened if there had been a larger population in the area. i will download the photos in due course but it really is a visual thing and I recommend that if you are in this area, you make sure of a visit because it is truely amazing.
We returned to the motel suitable awestruck and found that a massive truck had pulled up nearby, Rog has been dribbling over it! there was also a truck hauling a beam of wood longer than I have ever seen. We estimated that it was over 120 feet long, one single tree, trimmed, planed and ready for instalation, somewhere.
Next leg, onto Yellowstone. See you soon,
Chris
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